‘Hello to you, too,’ Heidi said, and put the pizzas down. People noticed Heidi when she talked to them. Heidi had almost perfected looking like there was only one of her, but when Heidi talked to Peggy and Greta in a crowded room like this, she seemed slightly different from anyone else who talked to Peggy and Greta. People looked at her and sometimes they scowled. Once, a guy yelled at her from across a room. Called her a slut. No matter what Heidi did – no matter how good she got – when she was talking to Peggy and Greta people got interested and sometimes, if the room was loud enough and crowded enough, they got angry. Peggy and Greta were frightened that one day Heidi would worry about this and that her standing as a single person would mean more to her than Peggy and Greta’s friendship and they wouldn’t hear from her again.

Heidi hugged them both in turn, and as she pulled each of them in they smelled her, hard. Would her smell give her away? What had Dell smelled like?

‘Great party,’ Heidi said.

‘Yeah,’ said Peggy.

‘How’s Dell,’ Greta said, taking a sip from the paper cup she was holding. She’d seen other people do it. To make a comment look offhand, not important, just niceties, but in the fluster of it all she’d forgotten that Peggy had already asked, and Peggy elbowed her very subtly, not to stop her but just because she couldn’t control herself.

‘Um . . .’ Heidi was filling a paper cup of her own. Lifting the bottles of soft drink and juice that had filled the table to a tilt to see what they were. ‘I don’t really know.’ She took the lid off some orange juice that was mixed with sparkling water.

‘It’d be nice to see her sometime,’ Greta said.

‘You just have to look at me,’ Heidi said, and laughed.

‘To spend time with her,’ Peggy said. ‘To spend time with both of you.’

‘Yeah,’ Heidi said. ‘I don’t think you’d like that so much.’

‘Why not?’ They said it together. They were completely thrown – the lights, the thump of the bass from the speakers. That was all.

‘Dell’s not how you remember her,’ Heidi said, and then put her index finger to the side of her head and rolled her head back and forward, making a mad face. She was sipping from the cup now. ‘Do you want to dance?’ she said, turning fully round to Peggy and Greta. ‘Remember this song? We loved this song.’ Without waiting for a reply, she walked onto the dancefloor and started dancing with a guy they knew from the meetings.

Peggy and Greta were left standing by themselves. ‘Fuck,’ Peggy said, and shook her head.

‘What is wrong with us?’ Greta said. ‘We’re going fucking crazy.’

‘Persecution complex much?’ said Peggy.

‘We have to apologise to her,’ Greta said. ‘Fuck.’